Sympathy

Résumé En

John Ruskin in Fors Clavigera defines sympathy as 'the imaginative understanding of the natures of others, and the power of putting ourselves in their place, […] the faculty on which virtue depends' (Vol 3 Letter 34 [October 1873] 627). Recently, a renewed interest in sympathy during the Victorian period has led critics to look into previously overseen aspects of what has variously been considered as an emotion 1 and/or a complex mental exercise; 2 as a natural and innate principle and/or an acquired one; as a guide in moral development and, if one goes back to its Greek roots, as a similitude (sym) among feelings, passions or emotions (pathos) of distinct individuals.In this respect, recent studies (Keen; Radcliffe; Hammond and Kim) have reconsidered what happens when we engage with fictional characters and how we feel when doing this, in a way that zeroes in onto what Martha Nussbaum considers to be an uneven, but necessary step within a larger sympathetic 3 process. Where Nussbaum emphasises the disastrous effects of imaginative starvation through her analysis of the Gradgrind children in Dickens's novel Hard Times, or the disappearance of the humanities in education, these new studies highlight the discontinuities between the imaginative and the real, and the many imaginative attractions (Keen) and manipulations (Ablow) that challengingly complexify the concept of sympathy, not to mention the tortuous trajectories between feeling and acting, fiction and reality.In this paper, we shall on the one hand investigate the place of the imagination, with all its so-called vagaries and irregularities, within the sympathetic process. And we shall also prolong the path Nussbaum took, by looking into the new field of empathy studies that, over the past ten years, has elicited fresh interdisciplinary dialogue involving literature, neurosciences, cognitive sciences, psychology and psychopathology, ethology, sociology, moral philosophy and many other disciplinary fields. Our article aims at pursuing the investigation of sympathy within the interdisciplinary field of empathy studies which now encompasses it. We contend, as Meghan Marie Hammond and Sue J. Kim do in Rethinking Empathy through Literature, that literature plays a central role in interdisciplinary discussions 1 See Max Scheler: for Scheler sympathy and love are emotions in the literal sense of the term-in the sense of motions, movements, which lead us out and beyond ourselves(xl). 2 See D. Rae Greiner: 'sympathy had for some time [in the nineteenth-century imagination] been considered a formal process, a mental exercise but not an emotion' (418). 3 Nussbaum prefers to use the term compassion to refer to what eighteenth-century philosophers called sympathy.